RIAA Records 25 Millionth URL Takedown on Google

That's a pretty big number; what's bigger, however, is the increase in takedown notices that the RIAA has been serving to Google lately.

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Achievement unlocked: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has officially passed the 25 million mark for the number of URLs that it has asked Google to take down from its search listings.

That puts the RIAA just 3 million or so requests away from earning top honors on Google's list of reporting organizations, with copyright protection company Degban sitting high at 28.7 million URLs requested across more than 16,000 different domains. (The RIAA is already the copyright owner with the highest number of URL takedowns on Google.)

The most interesting note about the RIAA's Google campaign is not the raw number of URLs it has successfully had pulled off the search engine. Rather, it is the seemingly growing rate at which the RIAA is getting these sites delisted.

According to a report from TorrentFreak, the RIAA only hit its 20 millionth URL takedown in May, and it took the organization more than a year's worth of time to reach that milestone. If you're not doing the math, that means the RIAA was able to accomplish in approximately six weeks or so one-fourth of what it was able to accomplish in a year.

"However, it now seems that either the RIAA are getting faster and better at sending notices, or the situation is somehow getting worse. It's quite possibly a combination of the two," TorrentFreak speculated.

One situation that isn't helping copyright owners and enforcers  but might be helping to boost the counts of URLs submitted for removal  is the rash of proxy sites that invariably (and continually) spring up when a well-known site receiving plenty of copyright infringement takedown notices starts to have troubles.

The easiest example? The Pirate Bay. As TorrentFreak noted, links to torrent files found via The Pirate Bay might get pulled from Google results, but it's more difficult and more time-consuming for rights-holders or reporting organizations to submit requests for the many mirror sites that get generated (like PirateProxy, PirateReverse, or PirateBay.ee, to name a few). This frequently happens as a "primary" site like The Pirate Bay encounters server troubles or, worse for the site, gets taken offline by its hosting provider.

One anti-piracy company representative estimates that an additional 5 million search results have been taken down from Google as a result of these mirrors for the Web's more popular file-sharing sites.

It's also arguable whether copyright holders' practice of serving up takedown notices for files and sites is even accomplishing the overall goal of curbing Web-based piracy.

"There is a cat-and-mouse game between uploaders and copyright owners, where pirated content is being uploaded by the former and deleted by the latter, and where new One-Click Hosters and direct download sites are appearing while others are being shut down. Currently, this game seems to be in favor of the many pirates who provide far more content than what the copyright owners are taking down," reads a report on anti-piracy measures from Boston Northeastern University researchers published earlier this year.

David Murphy got his first real taste of technology journalism when he arrived at PC Magazine as an intern in 2005. A three-month stint turned to six months, six months turned to occasional freelance assignments, and he has since rejoined his tech-loving, mostly New York-based friends as one of PCMag.com's news contributors.
His rise to (self-described) fame in the world of tech journalism began during his stint an associate editor at Maximum PC, where his love of cardboard-based PC construction and meetings put him in charge...
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